


Darling, You Should Have Told Me.

by sleeby



Category: Game Grumps
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, In This House We Love Suzy, M/M, Self-Harm, but its all good with suzy, established egobang, everything ends up fine I promise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-24
Updated: 2018-08-24
Packaged: 2019-07-01 18:51:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15780012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sleeby/pseuds/sleeby
Summary: Arin's been having it bad lately. He just can't get his brain out of his old familiar depressive spiral. He thought he was over this! He's fucking everything up! Honestly, he should just die. No one cares as much as they say they do anyway.





	Darling, You Should Have Told Me.

**Author's Note:**

> Hey!! this fic deals with descriptions of self-harm and I highly recommend that you avoid it if it's a thing that could potentially trigger you. I deal with this and I wrote this as a vent fic for myself, but I understand that it's difficult to read for some, so take care of yourselves okay?? love yall,,

Arin let out some scrambled noise caught between a scream and a yell as he chucked the controller across the room. “THIS IS FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE!!!!”, he spat. He and Dan had stayed late to record some glitchy garbage NES game that had Arin grinding his teeth. Dan’s laughter filled the dead space as Arin deflated into the couch. He wasn’t even fucking mad at the game! It was just proof that he was completely fucking stupid and inept. He couldn’t even beat this dumbass cheap game from fucking 1982! The game over music loop makes him so angry at himself that he was two seconds away from seriously attempting to claw off his face. “Next time on game grumps!!” announced a somehow still cheery Dan, as he quickly stopped the recording and marked the time sheet. Arin remained motionless in his position, hands pulling at his eyes and eyes glued to the screen even as Dan removed the game. It had probably been a full minute of silence before Dan cautiously spoke up, “Are you doing alright, big cat?” Arin’s entire being still felt uncooperative as he blinked slowly out of his stare. Dan’s worried puppy eyes felt like a punch in the gut, he shouldn’t have been this fucking obvious. “Yeah...yeah, I think I’m just tired?” Arin motions vaguely with his hands, “I just... don't think I’m having very good mental health days lately.” At this, Danny frowned and sat back down next to Arin. “Oh.” he fiddles with his hands for a moment before taking a breath to continue, “Have you seen your therapist lately?” Arin instinctively steeled his expression. “Not for a couple months, but I have an appointment coming up in a week or two.” Dan nodded in the way that you do when you’re working up to say something difficult. So his voice only wavered the slightest bit when he asked, “You haven’t...I mean you haven’t thought about...hurting yourself or anything, have you?”, Dan asked, voice trailing off. Arin immediately felt his guard go up. His skin prickled and he felt the tips of his ears go bright red. He tried and failed to not let his defensiveness show in his voice as he replied with his simple, “No.” Dan was clearly still worried, but it’s hard to want to distrust a friend when they are so vulnerable. “Okay, big cat...just wanna look out for you.” He reaches out a hand to pat Arin on the knee. “Do ya think you can get home okay?” Arin nodded. He must have really looked as bad as he felt if Dan was worried about him driving. Dan still looked skeptical but sighed. He started to stand up and put on his jacket. “Alright, please call me if you need me, sweet stuff.” for good measure he swept in over the back of the couch to plant a quick kiss on Arin’s cheek. “Love ya!!” he singsonged as he pranced out the door. 

The drive home for Arin was a complete blur. Which is not exactly good when you are operating a dangerous fast-moving metal machine, but Arin honestly couldn’t bring himself to care. He opened the door with slow-moving arms and kicked off his shoes. He didn’t feel like eating dinner so he gravitated towards the couch and flopped onto it. He should have taken Dan up on driving him home. He could have stayed over. Just another thing he’s fucked up, I guess.  
Arin shook his head as if to shake away the old bad feelings creeping up again. He blinked slowly but the tiredness had seeped into his skin. He felt made of molasses, but he knew that could change sickeningly fast once you set your mind to something. Arin clutched his arms around his chest a little tighter. He hated that Dan even brought it up, even if he was unaware of Arin’s history. It was a vice he had dealt with that he really didn't like to think about. It brought something like bile up in his throat and made it difficult to breathe. He had been young and fucking stupid and he had had a real problem with self-loathing. He wasn’t like that anymore. The scars were barely visible. You could really only see the haphazard red lines if he was overheated, or if you were comparing his arms particularly closely. Regardless, it had been years. He liked his body a lot more and thousands of people don’t openly hate him on the internet. Well, they still do, but at least now it’s counteracted tenfold by all the lovelies. He should be happy. Suzy helped tremendously back in the day, he still feels guilty for how much stress it must have caused her. Normally in these sort of moods, he would go to her to vent, or sometimes say nothing at all and let himself cry and be soothed. But Suzy was visiting friends for a couple days. And it was certainly past midnight at this point. And his limbs weighed a hundred pounds each. Arin’s eyes felt stupid. Glazed and tired and unblinking. He really hadn’t missed these nights where he wondered if he was even alive. 

Perhaps sensing his distress, Mimi let out a soft mew and hopped onto Arin’s chest where he laid on the couch, waving her fluffy tail in his face. He felt something like happiness stir in his chest but not enough to even muster a smile. “Hey there, Mimi.” he croaked, he felt on the verge of tears. Arin’s consciousness was somewhere up and to the left. There's just this...small fluffy animal in his house that loves him, that he takes care of, and one day it will die. God, he was even a disappointment to his fucking cat. After some indeterminate amount of time spent floating and petting Mimi, whom despite the threat of mortality Arin loves dearly, his legs had that uncomfortable needle feeling and he found the will to sit up. Instantly his head swam and his vision fizzled into blackness. That's fine. Whatever. Fucking might as well. When his vision cleared he took his shaking legs towards his bedroom, changing into his biggest and coziest pajamas. The brief moment he looked in the mirror made him feel vaguely sick. _‘Why the fuck does anyone like me?’_ He pressed his hands into his eyes with enough force to hurt and see stars. He couldn't understand why everyone couldn't see what a worthless piece of shit he was. He sat down on the floor where he was standing. Why bother moving to the bed? The silence made his ears ring and he noticed he had been absentmindedly scratching his arm, leaving faint red lines. Arin wasn't supposed to do that. It was a stupid thing to do. He was an adult! With a successful business! He repeated these reasons to himself somewhere in the back left corner of his mind as he sluggishly made his way to the bathroom. He wasn't gonna do anything. He was a rational and responsible adult. He didn’t have this problem anymore. He just wanted the option. If he has the option then he will calm down and realize that it's not something he wants to do and then he can just sleep and see Dan in the morning and laugh about how weird he was yesterday. He would be fine.

Arin was not fine. He was sitting on the bathroom floor with his head between his knees, feeling that anxiety that comes with feeling like you're gonna throw up. Or maybe it's the anxiety that's making him feel like you're gonna throw up. It doesn't matter, Arin felt like shit. His eyes felt foggy and heavy. Watching the razor blade twirl in his hand wasn't helping his thoughts. He knew it wouldn't. He always knew that. He let his mind go blank from trying to rationalize anything. From thinking about anyone he knows, any of his responsibilities, anything. His head was effectively empty as he gently ran the blade up and down his forearm. This was fine, he was just scratching it up and down, it doesn't even hurt or leave any marks, it was alright. And then it escalated (because it always escalated) and Arin familiarly and so carefully made the first horizontal cut on his upper forearm. It was only deep enough to bleed, it wouldn't even drip, it was fine. It didn't even hurt, exactly. It was nice, grounding. The stinging pain was what he deserved anyway. Once he got over his initial fear it got easier. Some were accidentally deeper than intended when he got careless, but it didn't really matter. He had to keep going until he had enough. He focused for a while on the bare patch of skin near his wrist. He would have to wear a sweatshirt that covered his hands so they wouldn't accidentally ride up. He went up and worked on the inside side of his forearm. Then around the other curve of the outside. By this time the blood was getting slightly out of hand, Arin was shaking, he had had enough. Fuck. 

After a minute to breathe, he fell into the routine of cleaning up. He dabbed at his arm with damp paper towels. It always emphasized how much he had made himself bleed. Arin was torn between being proud and ashamed. After he stopped bleeding and his arm was cleaned, he made sure to bury the paper towels in the trash, wash the razor blade and put everything back how it was. Putting his long sleeves back over his newly wounded arm was... unpleasant. It stung and itched and he was worried about bleeding on the fabric and getting it stuck to his wounds. But it was fine. He felt the most calm he had in a while. God, it was too fucking late for this. He was gonna be so dead tired in the morning. He curled up in bed and picked up his phone to charge. He had a missed call and a bunch of texts from Dan. _Fuck_. 

_*Missed call from Dan:11:58 PM*_

12:00 Dan: _Hey big cat did you get home okay?_  
12:03 Dan: _I hope you went to bed you need the rest_  
12:04 Dan: _I'm just...worried about you_  
12:04 Dan: _Not that you can't handle yourself_  
12:04 Dan: _You can!_  
12:05 Dan: _You're my big strong man!_  
12:06 Dan: _I just hate seeing you so down_  
12:07 Dan: _I love you_  
12:15 Dan: _Just call me if you need me okay? I love you._

Arin's heart sunk. He's done bad. He's done a bad fucked up thing. He's made his boyfriend worry. He's worried and he doesn't even know what he did. He's going to freak out. He's going to freak out and break up with him. He's going to break up with him and Suzy will be disappointed because she was so happy for him when they got together. Suzy...Suzy will be so upset he relapsed. He's already such a burden with his problems, now he's back at his lowest point all over again. Arin only realized he was crying when he felt the wet spot from his tears on the pillow. He took some deep breaths to try and sound like he wasn't crying. He glanced at the time. One in the morning. Nice. Arin ignored the shaking in his hands and the stinging in his arm and hoped to whatever was out there that Dan was still awake as he shakily hit the call button.

He picked up after the fourth ring.  
“Hello?” Dan's voice was groggy from just waking up.  
Arin barely made a sound before he started crying. Full-on, hyperventilating, ugly crying. Every time he tried to stop and apologize he just ended up crying more. Dan's voice instantly turned panicked. “Arin?? What's wrong??”  
Arin made a desperate attempt to calm his breathing, not that it helped much, “I-I'm I'm s- I'm sorry. I'm sorry I'm sorry, I'm sorry.”  
“What's happening? Are you okay??”  
“I can't, I can't, I c-can't, I-”  
“Arin I'm coming over there, breathe sweetheart.”  
“Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay okay, okay.”  
“I'll see you soon, I love you.”  
“I l-love you.”

As the call hung up the little strength Arin had gathered for the call vanished and he fully collapsed into the bed. He didn't realize he had fallen asleep until he felt Dan gently shake his shoulder. Dan looked about as fragile as Arin felt. He opened his mouth to say something but quickly opted to gather Arin into a big hug. The kind of hug you give someone you'd thought you'd lost, tight and all-consuming. Coincidentally, Arin lost it. It turns out it's very difficult to run out of tears. They sat there a while, Dan having settled on the bed, he scooped up and was cradling Arin as he cried and tried to tell him what has been going on in his head. He still wasn't making much sense, and Arin wasn't about to tell Dan his tragic backstory at this moment in time, but he tried to justify how he was having enough of an emotional breakdown that Dan drove over at past one in the morning. After a particularly bad fit of sobs, Dan gently took Arin's hand to place a kiss on the back of it. Arin's face must've been odd as Dan's fingers gently wrapped around his wrist, causing Dan to freeze. 

Neither of them could say anything in that moment, even if they tried it probably would have been swallowed up by the stuffy cotton immovable feeling in the air. Dan looked directly into Arin's eyes as he slowly turned over his wrist, slow and deliberate enough to show that Arin could pull away at any time, and they could just continue on, and he wouldn't have to talk about it. It could just be Schrodinger's Forearm. We don't know if it's been fucked up or not until it's observed, so we can keep on always assuming that it's fine. Arin felt like he was dying, but it didn't feel right to deliberately hide from his boyfriend. Lying by omission is one thing, it’s easier to justify; this would just be lying on its own. Dan held him with a sort of reverence reserved for precious artifacts as he slowly pushed the sleeve up Arin's arm. Dan couldn't hide his shock and sadness at seeing the cuts and the older faded scars. He remained as silent as possible as he made his way up Arin's arm until he found where they ended around his elbow. Arin couldn't make eye contact with him as he looked at his arm. He felt like a failure. He's upset one of the people he loves the most. The worst part is he can't crush the feeling of pride in getting what he deserved. He accomplished something that he felt he needed to do. His head was pounding, had he been holding his breath? Arin gasped, snapping Dan out of his thoughts. He spoke in a whisper like this moment was made of glass, “Does...Suzy know about this?” Arin nodded. “About.. _this_ ," Dan gestured vaguely, "recently?” Arin hesitated and shook his head. Dan took a shaky breath to steady himself, he had to be the strong one right now. Practical. “Did you clean the wounds?” Arin nodded. “Do they need bandages?” Arin shook his head slowly. Dan sighed. “Okay.” Arin stared at his arm. He hates the pride he feels. He hates that no matter how much other's tell him he just can't see it as how bad it is. He hates it. He hates it. Part of him whispers that he wouldn't have to deal with this if he had just followed through all those years ago. Arin didn't want to think about it. The thought still terrified him. He focused his energy instead on cuddling Dan as much as physically possible. They ended up laying together, Dan insisting that they use the covers because “I'm going to keep you safe by means of bubble wrap if I have to.” Dan was nervously stroking his hair, but it was a comforting gesture. Dan's other arm was a tight and heavy comforting force around his waist and Arin took the opportunity to bury his face in his chest. Here he could pretend that it didn't happen. 

Dan mumbled into Arin's hair.  
“You know we're gonna have to tell Suzy, right?”  
Arin was silent.  
“She's probably gonna make you talk to someone, maybe move up your counselor appointment…” Dan trailed off a bit. He had a lump in his throat causing him to tear up for not the first time tonight. Dan's voice cracked, “You know I love you, right?” Arin could feel a few tears fall into his hair. “I...I love you so much, Arin. You're...You're the best fucking person I've ever met. You've changed my life in so many ways…” A semi-hysterical chuckle escaped him, “Ironically I'd probably be dead by now if we hadn't met. Being with you has been the best time of my entire life, and I...all I want is for you to be happy.” Now they both had fresh tears streaming down their faces. Arin whispered from his nook against Dan’s chest, “I'm sorry. I'm, I'm so sorry. I love you too, Dan. I love you. I'm so, so sorry.” Dan hugged him closer and stroked his hair, “Sssh shh it's all okay baby bear.” Arin let out a sound between a laugh and a sob, smiling lightly, “It...really isn't.” Dan allowed himself a small smile, “I guess not. But it will be, okay?” Arin quieted again, “Yeah..okay.” Dan kissed Arin on the forehead, just because he could, and again on the mouth (just because he could) and they drifted off to sleep. They could skip work tomorrow, Arin's fairly sure they've earned it.

**Author's Note:**

> comments make my entire life and i would love feedback if u have the time !!!! ;w; 
> 
> edit please give feedback i am begging


End file.
